Advice Goddess

Thrilla in vanilla & getting into your genes

Q: My best friend is a guy. We
have tons in common and have conversations that are lively, honest, and
deep. He’s basically everything I’ve ever wanted in my future husband,
but he has an infatuation for Filipina women half his age. I’m 37, his
age, and Caucasian. His plan is to find and marry a girl from the
Philippines. In fact, he is so stuck on marrying a Filipina that he is
learning to speak Tagalog and travels to the Philippines twice a year
but has yet to have anything work out. I maintain hope that he’ll
eventually develop the attraction to me that I have for him and that
compatibility will trump looks, because he often tells me how much he
appreciates me. Am I fooling myself, or could he outgrow his Filipina
fetish?

—Boring American Woman

A: If people could override their
physical attractions, strip clubs could hire homely but very kind women
to bare only their souls. For the price of a lap dance, they’d tell a
man all about their work easing the suffering of cancer patients or
nursing stray dogs back to health. Afterward, he’d go home to his hot
but mean wife and do his marital duty — while fantasizing about Martha
getting little Buster to a really good home.

Whenever you start looking at your friend
through future-husband-colored glasses, remind yourself that the guy’s
learning Tagalog, and not because he calls the cable company and they
say, “Press one for Tagalog.” Lust is a powerful and automatic
biochemical reaction driven by sex hormones in the brain. One study by
Dr. Ingrid R. Olson suggests that we appraise whom we find hot in 13
milliseconds or less — approximately 25 to 30 times faster than an eye
blink. And unfortunately, we can’t rejigger whom we lust after — any
more than we can convince ourselves that something that smells like ass
really smells like lily of the valley.

You need to stop focusing on how you
click with this guy. I also really click with my friend Debbie, but when
I look at her and feel longing, it’s to ask her where she got her
barrette. This means we’re well-matched as friends and hair accessory
shoppers but nothing more. What you need is a guy with a you fetish —
one who thinks you’re the hottest thing since he leaned back, trying to
look cool for you, and burned his hand on the party host’s stove. To
find that man, banish your Filipina-phile from your mind as anything
more than a friend with a thing for women who aren’t you. If that’s hard
to do, stop hanging out with him so much until it stops being hard.
Save for meeting a fairy godmother in the supermarket and having her
transform you into a 4-foot-11, 18-year-old hottie from Manila, there’s
only one way you’ll ever make this guy fall for you, and that’s by
installing a tripwire.

Q: I’m 27 and passionately in love
with a 24-year-old woman I just started dating. I said something in
passing about not knowing whether I want kids, and she said, “If I’m not
pregnant within two years by you, IŽll get pregnant by somebody else.”
Shocked, I asked who. Her answer: “Preferably a friend, but it doesn’t
really matter.” My jaw dropped. I wonder whether I even matter or I am
just being used.

—Disturbed

A: You were probably picturing
yourself as more of a sex machine than a sperm dispenser. (If there’s a
movie of your relationship in your mind, it’s the kind that gets blocked
by Net Nanny software. In hers, Julie Andrews and the von Trapp
children are bounding through the meadows in their clothes made out of
curtains.)

The fact that her romantic role model
seems to be the speeding bullet doesn’t mean that she isn’t into you or
that she’s using you. In fact, her honesty suggests otherwise. (She
didn’t let you get all attached only to tell you to either dad up or get
out.) But, numerous studies splashed across the media show that single
parenting disadvantages kids economically, emotionally, in school
performance, and in their later relationships, and troublingly, all she
can think about is the tumbleweed blowing around her empty womb.

If you know you don’t want kids, now’s
the time to leave. If you aren’t sure, you can stick around and try to
figure it out, but the giant ticking uterus hanging over your head may
warp the course of getting to know her. After all, it’s kind of a
romance-killer to be hearing “It had to be you…” while you know she’s
thinking, “Then again, the UPS guy looks like he has a healthy sperm
count.”